Operation Protective Edge, ethnic cleansing and the issue of genocide

Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East. He attended the VUB in Brussels and did his graduate work at the universities of Essex and Oxford. In Oxford, Erimtan was a member of Lady Margaret Hall and he obtained his doctorate in Modern History in 2002. His publications include the book “Ottomans Looking West?” as well as numerous scholarly articles. In the period 2010-11, he wrote op-eds for Today’s Zaman and in the further course of 2011 he also published a number of pieces in Hürriyet Daily News. In 2013, he was the Turkey Editor of the İstanbul Gazette. He is on Twitter at @theerimtanangle

Smoke rises following what witnesses said was an Israeli air strike in Gaza City August 8, 2014. (Reuters) / Reuters

Last Tuesday, the Israeli government decided to bring its near month long campaign of destruction and devastation of the Gaza Strip to a halt with a temporary ceasefire (arguably meant to hold longer), claiming its immediate objectives had been achieved.

These goals seem to have been the wanton destruction of
Palestinian lives and property, though the official line states
that the Israeli Defense Forces targeted Hamas by destroying
their hide-outs and tunnels. The New York Times' Steven Erlanger
and Ben Hubbardaug insightfully say that "Gazans emerged to
view a shattered landscape," as the fighting stopped and
Hamas remained in charge over the tiny sliver of land cradled
between Egypt and Israel.

The ceasefire had been brokered by Egypt and both Israel and
Hamas sent delegations to Cairo. They were meant to hammer out
long-term deals and conditions for the resumption of peace, or
rather lack of deadly, unilateral attacks on ill-fated inmates
happening to live in the world's largest open air prison. The
place has now been reduced to all but a "shattered
landscape," or as RT's Paula Slier put it, "Gaza is in
tatters" following four weeks of bombardments and attacks.

The pretext used by Israeli Premier Benjamin "Bibi"
Netanyahu to unleash the awful might of the US-funded IDF
was the killing of three Israeli teenagers. Netanyahu lost no
time to ascribe blame and single out suspected killers and plan
the execution of a punishment: "Hamas is responsible, and
Hamas will pay." Among the first to cast doubt on Bibi's
seemingly unwavering conviction was the Buzzfeed Middle East
Correspondent Sheera Frenkel, indicating that the abduction and
murder of the teenagers was carried out by locals without any
regard for repercussions, or consequences or even direct links
and connections with the Islamic Resistance Movement or Hamas. In
hindsight, it seems that Protective Edge (the code name given to
this fourth war against Hamas in the past eight years) was a
pre-planned and organized operation, carried out at the drop of a
hat once a sufficient pretext or impetus was found or possibly
fabricated.

Whenever violence erupts in the Holy Land, as Occupied
Palestine-now-known-as-Israel is sometimes referred to, charges
of anti-Semitism are never far off to detract from serious
criticism of the military actions carried out by the Jewish
State.

Bibi as well as other members of his government kept repeating
the mantra that "Israel has a right to defend itself,"
against all but impotent Qassam rockets either landing in
uninhabited fields or being intercepted by Israel's much-vaunted
Iron Dome (or kippat barzel, in Hebrew), the Jewish State's
mobile air defense system developed by Rafael Advanced Defense
Systems Ltd, one of Israel's many high-tech manufacturing firms.
The Israeli mantra also keeps being repeated in the mainstream
media and mouthed by pro-Israeli pundits and television
personalities.

For example, the American comic Bill Maher, whose HBO show is
highly popular around the world via the internet and who himself
does not mince words when it comes to either "smoking pot" or
being an atheist, is a telling example of such a TV personality
not shying away from condemning Hamas and defending Israel. As
such, Maher's dislike of the Muslim faith actually verges on the
very edges of Islamophobia, hence his utter abhorrence of the
organization of Hamas, even tweeting about it on 17 July:

Dealing w/ Hamas is like dealing w/ a crazy woman who's trying
to kill u - u can only hold her wrists so long before you have
to slap her

Thereby he succeeded to appear sexist, racist and insensitive to
the mentally ill, which is quite a feat for a self-professed
liberal. During one of his shows (aired on 1 August), Maher
literally said that “it’s a war that Hamas started. And
somehow when Israel reacts to this, they have to do everything in
a way that doesn’t kill any civilians,” even adding that
“people die in wars” arguably referring to the 1,875
Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip over the past weeks, with
at least 430 of these dead aged 18 or younger (as confirmed by
the Gaza health ministry). The health ministry spokesperson
Ashraf al-Qudra added that more than 60 families have been
"massacred." Among these "people [that] die in
wars" were 24-day old Mustafa Wael al-Ghoul as well as
99-year Mohammed Mazen Faraj Daher. Or, perhaps Maher was
thinking about the 67 Israelis that perished during the IDF
attacks, including 64 soldiers, two civilians and one foreign
national. His remark seems particularly callous, flippant and
highly insensitive - "people die in wars."

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)
recorded the testimony of a nine-year-old girl from Rafah, given
to an UNRWA (or United Nations Relief and Works Agency)
counselor, in its Gaza Emergency Situation Report (published on 3
August 2014, 1500 hrs): "I watched the missile falling on my
home. My home burned. It burned all my toys, clothes and my room.
I think I will not survive." However, a few days earlier,
the Israeli Premier, apparently utterly serious and devoid of any
traces of irony or sarcasm, told a cabinet meeting that the
"IDF is a moral army without peer. It is vigorously fighting
an enemy whose brutality is without peer. It tries, as much as
possible, to avoid harming civilians."

Maher was also one of those repeating the mantra that "Israel Has
a Right to Defend Itself" as well as the statement that Hamas
uses "civilians" as "human shields," a
statement used to justify the IDF deliberately bombing family
homes, UN shelters, schools, mosques, hospitals, water
infrastructure and other "civilian" targets. The US
government, as an active participant in Israeli life, also
weighed in on this thorny issue: in its House of Representatives,
the Republican , Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, with 76 co-sponsors (47
Republicans and 29 Democrats) introduced Resolution 107
“Denouncing the use of civilians as human shields by Hamas
and other terrorist organizations in violation of international
humanitarian law" (16 July 2014). While, in the Senate, the
notorious Republican Ted Cruz, co-sponsored by Kirsten
Gillibrand, a Democrat, introduced a similar resolution, calling
"on the international community to recognize the grave
breaches of international law committed by Hamas in using human
shields" (24 July 2014).

In contrast, the Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow, for his part,
declared the following: "I was on the streets of Gaza last
week for several days. And I have to say the idea that these
people are human shields – you see people being wounded and
killed simply because strikes hit the street they're on. I mean,
they are not human shields. This is a densely populated area in
which there are ordinary people living ordinary lives, in as far
as is possible in this extraordinary situation. They're not human
shields."

Even the BBC's senior Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen wrote in
the New Statesman that his "impression of Hamas is different
from Netanyahu’s. I saw no evidence during my week in Gaza of
Israel’s accusation that Hamas uses Palestinians as human
shields." When Bowen's twitter feed suddenly fell silent on
22 July, voices immediately popped up accusing the BBC of caving
in to Israeli intimidation. Alas, as expressed by a BBC
spokesperson: "Claims that Jeremy Bowen has been removed from
Gaza under Israeli pressure are nonsense. After reporting from
Syria, Iraq, Israel and Gaza he is on holiday, but will be
returning to the Middle East very soon.”

But Bill Maher is far from being the only television personality
to defend the State of Israel -- a purported nation state that
"entitles any Jew in the world to settle in Israel and
acquire its citizenship," by means of its "Law of Return
(1952)", which is "Israel's basic citizenship law".
And according to Shlomo Guberman, a retired Deputy Attorney
General (Legislation), the "question [of] 'Who is a Jew', for
the purpose of The Law of Return" was resolved in the
following manner: "In 1970 the Law of Return was amended to
include a definition of 'Jew', according to which a Jew was one
who was born to a Jewish mother or had converted to Judaism and
does not belong to another faith."

Hence, Israeli citizenship is commensurate with arguably nominal
or possibly actual adherence to the tenets of the faith of
Judaism. Hence the State of Israel is a nation state in all but
name, as it purports to offer a home to anybody professing to be
a believer (either by accident of birth or active conversion).

Judaism is the first of the so-called Abrahamic faiths, tracing
its roots to the legendary figure of the Prophet Abraham (who is
supposed to have lived in the early 2nd millennium BC). According
to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he was the "first of the
Hebrew patriarchs and a figure revered by the three great
monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam."

Sam Harris, another outspoken atheist, equally well-known for his
Islamophobic tendencies, in this context appears rather rational,
saying that he thinks that the "idea of a religious state is
ultimately untenable," while still upholding his defense of
Israel. But the reality is that religion is gaining ground in the
land of Israel. Orthodox Jews were but a small minority when the
Jewish State was set up in the late forties, but in the further
development of Israel they have now come to the fore.

At present, only the political party Jewish Home, as part of the
ruling coalition, can be seen to represent this religious strain
in Israeli society, the party's ultimate aim being the creation
of a polity governed by Jewish law. But three years ago, The
Economist reported that Orthodox Jews comprise "over 40
percent of new army officers and combat soldiers," even
adding that Orthodox Jews' "power is set to mount,"
given that "their birth rate is more than double that of
secular Jews."

As I have argued earlier, the Jewish State subjects non-Jews to
"veritable apartheid treatment." As long ago as 2006,
former US President Jimmy Carter stated that when "Israel
does occupy ... territory deep within the West Bank, and connects
the [then] 200-or-so settlements with each other, with a road,
and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, or in
many cases even crossing the road, this perpetrates even worse
instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in
South Africa." The West Bank barrier that Israel started
erecting in 2002 is a stark physical manifestation of the
enforcement of policies of separation and apartheid that Israel
is pursuing.

The recent Israeli attack on Gaza seems like a natural
consequence of this policy, given that the wanton destruction of
Palestinian lives and property in the Strip really seems
tantamount to an act of genocide, the ultimate result of an
exercise in ethnic cleansing that the IDF has actively applied
over the past weeks and the State of Israel over the past years
in the whole of the Occupied Territories. In fact, the Israeli
historian Ilan Pappe spoke of an “incremental genocide”
with regard to these policies in 2006, while the current
operation Protective Edge has merely replaced the adjective
"incremental" with "actual" in specific reference to the
Gaza Strip – the ever-inventive Pepe Escobar even speaking of
"Operation Kill Women and Children in Gaza" on social
media.

As if to confirm the journalist's hyperbolic statement, the
Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset and member of Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, Moshe Feiglin
also took to social media announcing that the "conquest of
the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces
and their supporters" was the aim and goal of operation
Protective Edge. And against this backdrop, the now more than
notorious if not celebrated Glenn Greenwald came out to say that
"new Snowden documents illustrate a crucial fact: Israeli
aggression would be impossible without the constant, lavish
support and protection of the US government, which is anything
but a neutral, peace-brokering party in these attacks. And the
relationship between the NSA and its partners on the one hand,
and the Israeli spying agency on the other, is at the center of
that enabling."

As a result, the picture now emerging shows an American behemoth
actively propping up a religious welfare state that is in the
process of ethnically cleansing its immediate environs with the
aim of arriving at a pure Jewish homeland, where the need for a
two-state solution no longer exists.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.